Yuuki

Diary

Yuuki once charged castle walls without blinking, so when he says he'll spar with the degenerates who lounge in the dirt lot behind the dojo, nobody dares call it reckless, not even when his finger folds sideways under some scumbag's knee like a cheap tent pole. He examines the swollen knuckle with the same flat calm he once reserved for arrows whistling past his ear, nods once, and declares this the day he becomes a better man, the kind who stretches, who tapes his hands, who does not ape into brawls with strangers who smell like a floor that already got rugged. The vow lasts exactly until the next dusty afternoon, when the same scumbags roll a joint and needle him about his form, and Yuuki, steady as ever, sets his splinted finger aside and wades back in anyway because honor apparently has no clause about smart decisions. He tells himself it's discipline, the old warrior kind, reborn as showing up even broken, though the truth is closer to a man who traded a sword for bruised pride and cheap weed smoke and somehow still calls it training. Quietly, almost heroically, he wraps the finger again, mutters